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The Cabot Tower Story

Bristol doesn't have many ghost stories.

 

I'm not sure if that's because it's a more modern city or because they have fewer restless dead due to a higher number of available cemetaries or because ghosts simply want to go and live somewhere else because even ghosts do not want to occupy Bristol any more than the living.

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But the story of Cabot Tower is one of the few.

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Daniel Aldershot lived in a small cottage very near the tower. He lived there when he started hearing the noises which happened at ten minutes past midnight, every single Saturday, without fail.

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The same night, the same time, the same noises.

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Thunk, thunk thunk, thunk, thunk.

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Pause.

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Thunk, thunk.

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He told other townsfolk about it, but few paid him any notice. It was common knowledge that he hit either the ale or cider particularly hard on Saturdays. This was true, but Daniel didn't hear those noises because he was drunk. He tended to feel a need to get drunk because of the noises.

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Many times he'd left the small cottage and ran over the dew speckled grass to Cabot Tower, the stars twinkling over his head, and pulled open the wooden door completely convinced he'd catch the person so intent upon making his nights so miserable and sleepless.

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He'd yank it open and be greeted by darkness, quiet and the looming black spiral staircase.

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Sometimes he'd wait outside to make sure of the noise before pulling open the door or would try and break the pattern of: Thunk, thunk thunk, thunk, thunk before the pause and two extra thunks.

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But it was no use, for the entire building seemed to fall silent as soon as that door was open.

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And yet Daniel Aldershot was always slightly hurried in closing the door again.

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There was clearly absolutely nothing there, but he felt something watching him. Sometimes it was watching from seven steps up and sometimes it was at the foot of the stairs. Sometimes it seemed to be inches away from his face and he found himself frozen in cold horror as the thing that wasn't there stared at him.

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He felt, or even knew, that if he leaned too far forward into the darkened stairwell that something would pull him in, and it wouldn't return him.

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It was around that time that things started going wrong at the tower.

Now we're not talking about the bricks leaking blood or bloodcurdling howls being heard or kids going missing. Hell, you can Google this stuff if you want.

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The lights at the top stopped working in around 2002 and the lift stopped working and became non-functional.

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That's your ghost story, ladies and gentlemen. Town drunk gets spooked by a dark tower, the electricity is on the blink and the lift isn't working, causing everyone mild inconvenience.

Paranormal stuff, truly.

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Only that's never the whole story, is it?

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The engineers who came out to fix the lift were confounded with it breaking down again and again and again. They checked the cables, the motors, the lift box and the shaft and it was all fine.

But it just wouldn't work. The cables would stop working, the motor would freeze and the lift box would stick halfway up as if trapped.

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Similarly, the men working on the fusebox found that no parts of it were damaged and the filaments on the lights were fine.

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One worker named Alex Gretchin did an interview in the daily paper on how it had been the most nightmarish few weeks imaginable, called out to fix a few bulbs and finding out that it simply wasn't working . "As if the rules of physics had just, like, stopped." he'd said in his interview.

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The man swore blind that things didn't get broken or sabotaged. They just didn't function in the first place.

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It wasn't much but it attracted a few clairvoyents and mystics to the area who were convinced of otherworldly forces. They soon departed though, there wasn't much to keep them there. 

Not enough for any ghost walk or merchandising opportunity or palm reading or even a ghost story.

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I appreciate the irony at work there.

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In most traditionalist ghost stories there is an escalation, yes? Events getting worse and worse until they reach some sort of peak event. 

Real life doesn't always work that way.

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Daniel Aldershot just kept hearing the same noises every single Saturday night until he almost wished to see a ghost, for something else or anything else to happen. Simply to break the monotony of the haunting .

He couldn't move house, it just wasn't affordable.

He couldn't explain the noises. Every website searched, local historians tracked down and queried. Even The Bristol Archives were searched.

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There was no ghost in Cabot Tower, and there never had been.

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Several weeks passed and Daniel Aldershot became increasingly unhinged.

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He snapped at his friends and his work colleagues. He became reclusive, convinced that something was being hidden from him, or somehow concealed right in front of him.

Before he stopped going out altogether, he told anyone who'd listen that the tower held a secret.

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A year later he was found dead in the rocking chair on his porch. There was no real established cause of death. He'd just fallen asleep outside on a cold night and didn't wake up again.

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It happens to more people than you'd expect, especially people around the age group of Daniel Aldershot's. 

 

Before I continue with my story, I want to make a point that the man wasn't some sort of raving lunatic or disturbed weirdo. His grandchildren were devastated by the news of his death, usually spending a rainy Sunday over at his little cottage doing arts and crafts whilst he told them stories of holiday adventures with his late wife, Marie.

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Sometimes they made cakes, sometimes if the weather permitted they'd sit in the garden. But he wasn't strange, he just happened to be an elderly man who was a bit cranky due to supernatural occurences who died of natural causes.

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When each room of his small cottage was cleared out they didn't find anything odd amongst his belongings. A few photo albums, a very rustic cigar box, a few porcelain figures. The sort of thing you'd expect amongst the possessions of a man his age.

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The only odd thing that was found amongst his belongings was a small drawing of a lightning bolt resting on top of study. Nobody thought anything of it and it was left on the desk.

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The funeral happened soon after and went off without a hitch.

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The only thing slightly off about the entire event was a comment made by the mortician as to just how thin Mr Aldershot's fingernails were. Almost as if they'd been worn down very slowly by being scratched against a particularly hard surface.

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It was a fortnight later that Augustus Spearing moved into the small cottage at the foot of Cabot Tower. (Yet another person living alone and not having anyone to really falsify these accounts. Convenient, isn't it?)

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He was more susceptible to the noise. I don't know why ghosts tend to bother the younger generations much more than the elderly. Maybe the spook in Cabot Tower had a way of knowing that Alderton wouldn't be trucking for much longer so didn't really mind him so much.

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But Augustus, Gus to his friends Jerry and Carl, knew something was up from day one.

Oh, he heard the knocking.

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Thunk, thunk thunk, thunk, thunk. Pause. Thunk, thunk.

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But he heard laughter as well. 

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Something was wrong up on that tower on the hill.

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Something was wrong.

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It wasn't long until he cracked and headed out onto the hill in the dead of night carrying with him a small drawing he'd found on top of the study when he'd moved in.

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He didn't quite know what it was that drove him to picking it up, but did so all the same.

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When he got to the tower, he spotted a broken spade sitting just outside the entrance next to a large flowerbed. Pulling off the metal head, he pushed open the door of the tower and stepped in.

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He instantly felt the chilling grip of the air inside.

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Gus took out the slip of paper and examined it. At first, it looked like a lightning bolt but when it was turned onto its side....

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They were stairs. Two stairs, clearly illustrated on the paper.

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Looking down, he noticed scratch marks on the concrete under his feet that were tinged slightly red and freckled with bits of broken nails. There was also what appeared to be a large split running down the side of the flooring.

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With a great shove, he pushed the spade-half into the crack almost instinctively and pulls the concrete flooring away.

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The next morning, the tower is cordoned off due to a fall risk. "The inside flooring gave way last night." said the stationed police officer to a gaggle of bored tourists.

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It was only closed off for a week, but in that time it was found that two extra steps were positioned underneath the concrete flooring along with a trapdoor. Underneath that were the decomposed remains of two gagged and hogtied bodies. They were so badly broken down over time that their gender could no longer be discerned.

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In 2010, renovation work was completed on Cabot Tower and the lights are now fully functional.

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The noises have never been heard on Saturday nights by the current tenants of the nearby cottage.

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Augustus Spearing has never been found.

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